LGA chief calls for ethnicity quotas in schools

Quotas for the number of ethnic minority pupils in individual state schools should be introduced, according to the head of the Local Government Association.

The Times reported Lord Bruce-Lockhart saying that Britain would never achieve integration and full social cohesion while neighbouring schools were divided along ethnic lines.

He described it as unacceptable that non-white pupils should form 90% of the population of one school, when white pupils formed 90% of a neighbouring school.

He suggested one solution would be for schools in areas with high concentrations of minority ethnic groups to incorporate some kind of ethnicity quota into admissions policies.

The former Conservative leader of Kent county council, Lord Bruce-Lockhart was reluctant to specify a quota, but said experts had suggested that schools should offer at least 25% of their places to those from other ethnic minority groups.

Lord Bruce-Lockhart told the newspaper he accepted that such policies would be difficult to put into practice, but said the most important thing was that a debate on school segregation should take place.

He said: "Proactive admissions policies could be used to establish a better ethnic balance in schools. In towns where the totality of the minority ethnic population is 15% of the whole, we should consider the use of numbers in admissions policies.

"We have to get to a situation where people regard the total ethnicity of a town as being represented in schools, otherwise we are never going to be properly integrated.

"Children start off being colour-blind and this is a wonderful thing. But if you have schools where the children are being educated in different ethnic groups you are going to lose that and you are simply not going to have integration."

He added: "If we are to have stable communities and to prevent the rise of the far right, our job now is to put all these issues on the table and open a public debate."

He said another way forward could be twinning schemes that pair predominantly white schools with predominantly non-white schools for activities such as sports and drama activities.

The chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, agreed that urgent action was needed, but was sceptical about the use of quotas.

He told the Commons education select committee: "I'm open to discussion, but I would not have said this is the first place we need to go."

He warned MPs that school segregation had now become a "settled pattern" in many towns, often with disastrous effects.

"The information we get from the front line . . . is that [segregation] contributes to conflict among young people. Gangs form at school and the ethnicisation of gang culture is part of that," he said.

The education spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, Tahir Alam, said ethnic quotas had been shown to be unworkable in the US, where the problem of pupil segregation was far more extreme.

"You cannot tell a parent that they cannot send their child to the school of their choice because it has met its racial quota. The right of parents to send their children to the school they want is a fundamental right in this country," he said.